Off Topic: The Best Way to Serve You, The Reader

Let me explain. As you can see, I've been posting less frequently of late. This is due in part to the increasing velocity of my day job, but it is also due to my increasing use of del.icio.us to highlight posts of interest. Using Feedburner, I can automatically post the links I collect in a given day as an entry in my feed. So, I post essays when the mood and my schedule allow, but I regularly direct my feed subscribers to interesting cloud computing content.

I generally like this approach, except for the fact that the links posts are lost to those readers that actually come to my site, and are also not picked up by Google or other search engines. It is impossible to comment on those link posts as well. Plus, writing the longer essays takes significant time, I usually need to write them all in one sitting to keep them remotely coherent, and thus finding time in the schedule gets harder and harder.

For the last couple of months, I have been working with (well, for, really) Matt Asay, a very successful blogger in the open source community. Matt's approach is to write several short but sweet posts every day, with only the very occasional in depth analysis post. His goal is to be the one place to go for open source news.

My goal is a little bit different. I want to call out the trends and issues related to cloud computing, as well as to make some bold (and, at times, foolish) predictions about what is being overlooked or undervalued in the hype surrounding the topic. So, I don't see myself posting as frequently as Matt, but I wonder if perhaps I should drop the del.icio.us approach, and actually write short but sweet posts about each link or group of related links. It may be a little more time intensive for me, but I would have searchable content, and I would get out smaller samples of my thinking more frequently.

The cost, potentially, would be fewer of the in depth posts that I have come to be known for...though at this point the word "fewer" is relatively meaningless as I have been posting so infrequently anyway. I still want to do the in depth posts, but they may become more like summary analysis of trends from earlier posts than the "out of the blue" analysis I have been doing. Less like Nick Carr, in other words.

What do you think? Is a change in order. Would you like to see more information more often, or deeper analysis on a one or two posts a week on average pace? Are you happy with the del.icio.us for subscribers approach, or do you want a more permanent and interactive approach towards that type of content?

Any feedback I can get (either in the comments below, or by email to jurquhart at yahoo dot com) would be greatly and gratefully appreciated.

About Me

James Urquhart is a widely experienced enterprise software field technologist. James started his career programming a manufacturing job tracking system on the Macintosh (circa 1991), and slowly expanded his experience to include distributed systems architectures, online community and identity systems, and most recently utility computing and cloud computing architectures. He has held positions in pre and post sales services, software engineering, product marketing, and program management for the online developer communities of one of the largest developer sites in the world. His admittedly schizophrenic background is driven by a desire to work with technologies that are disruptive, but that simplify computing overall.

James is also an avid blogger. His primary blog, recently renamed "The Wisdom of Clouds" (http://blog.jamesurquhart.com), is focused on utility computing, cloud computing and their effect in enteprises and individuals.

In addition to his online work, James is the father of two children: a son, Owen; and a daughter, Emery; and the husband of the perfect friend and wife, Mia. James lives in Alameda, CA, plays rock and bluegrass guitar.